BENNY WENT BACK inside his office as night started to take over and sat in his chair behind his desk. He put up his feet and tried to think while keeping the cold of the “emotion screen,” as his counselor called it, in place. Breaking down now might just end up getting him as dead as everyone else.
Outside the car alarms had calmed down some and the city was actually much quieter than he ever remembered hearing it, even late at night.
He looked around at the business he had put his heart into since getting out of the service and sighed. “Not much to do here. I think you need to figure out what to do with the next part of your life, Benny. Right?”
No one answered. His voice just echoed and that seemed damn creepy as well.
He stood and headed back out into the light of the city. Luckily, the electrical systems were still working, the stoplights still going through their cycles over piles of wrecked cars. The streetlights and building lights still made the night in the city seem like daylight. That was one of the many things he loved about this city. It never really got dark.
Now, more than likely, that wouldn’t last very long without people maintaining the power systems and lines. First good heat wave of the summer and this place would be a smelling pile of dead meat without electricity.
He headed the five blocks to his apartment, walking carefully around the bodies.
His apartment, a place he liked in most times, felt unusually silent. He clicked on the television, hoping to find something or someone to tell him what happened.
Nothing.
Some stations that had automatic programming were running, but the rest were just dead air.
The radio was the same, so he finally tuned the radio to an automatic light jazz station and let it play just to have some background music to pretend that society still existed outside the walls.
Then, using his computer, another appliance that would soon be worthless, he pulled up some maps of the New York area and the area going south.
After an hour of studying those maps, he decided the idea was too stupid for words. Assuming he made the hike all the way to Florida, even taking some cars once he was outside of the city, what was he going to do down there with the alligators and snakes and rotting-in-the-sun bodies?
“Think, Benny, think!”
He couldn’t think of one darned thing.
Nothing.
Then he figured he could go north, get away from all people in the woods, but he had never been one for camping. If he was going to rough it without power, he was going to do it in a plush apartment or suite. Bears shit in the woods, he liked indoor plumbing if he had a choice.
He then decided to make sure going south was as bad an idea as he had a hunch it was.
He started dialing friends he knew in Southern California from the service, another friend in Chicago from his college days, even an old girlfriend in Texas.
Again nothing.
He even dialed five of his old buddies who were still stationed overseas.
Not a one answered.
He dialed twenty people in total.
All machines or no answer.
Not rock-solid proof things were bad everywhere, but adding in the internet and television silence, enough for him.
He pushed the phone away and made himself take a deep breath, to make sure the panic would stay down.
Then he grabbed a yellow pad and asked, “What are you going to need to survive this summer and the following winter?”
Then he started making a list.
—He was going to need power for lights and air-conditioning and heat for long term.
—He was going to somehow need to figure out a way to get a place that he could hold back most of the smell until that passed, which was going to take some time and help from mother nature.
The bodies on the street would eventually dry out and mummify, which wouldn’t smell as bad, but then when the rains came, the smell would return for a time.
—He was going to need a place to store food and lots of canned supplies.
—And considering the nut cases in this town that might still be alive, he was going to need a place he could protect.
—And from the faint glow out his window from the building on fire ten blocks up the street, he would need a place that wouldn’t easily burn.
Maybe he could get a band of other survivors together who could work together to search for food and for defense.
He liked the sound of that.
He walked over to the window and stared toward the center of the city.
He stood there for a moment until suddenly he saw it.
The answer was right there in front of him. He knew exactly the place that fit the bill perfectly.
The Empire State Building.
Perfect.
He cooked himself a good steak dinner from his fridge and scanned the television and radio channels again as he ate, coming up blank yet again. Nothing was working besides automatic systems and those weren’t going to last long at all.
Then he put on a light jacket with his trusty .45 in one pocket along with a flashlight and headed out.
At night, even with the lights of the city still completely on, the bodies looked even stranger piled and sprawled on the sidewalk.
He figured the Empire State Building had pretty much everything he would need. It was a secured building so he could defend it, it would have a pretty fine security system and extra supply of weapons for the guards, and it would have generators. In fact, he was betting it had lots of generators to run all those elevators in power failures.
He seemed to remember that the building had a lot of different elevators. Also it was high enough and windy enough that even at the worst of the smell, it should be survivable up high in the building with windows sealed.
The biggest problem was going to be clearing out the bodies that had died inside. He was going to need to do that quickly as soon as he made sure the building actually did have everything he needed.
It took him a good hour winding his way through the dead to reach the Empire State Building.
He stopped a block away and looked up at it. The damn building was a lot bigger than he remembered it.
Securing it was a crazy idea, but considering the situation, a crazy idea was exactly what he needed.
CHAPTER SIX
GINA WORKED AT her desk and monitor for almost five hours straight with only occasional breaks to get more coffee. She had three screens, one of which showed a map of the big island and the streets of the city, another had a simpler map with red dots showing each survivor.
And her main screen had an image full of green dots, showing which survivors she had tagged.
In those hours, she had managed to get the biometric signatures of every survivor she could find in the dead city, watching the number of red dots shrink as the green dots increased.
As the next day went by, the heat signatures of survivors would help her find even more, she knew.
She glanced at her screen and the green dots scattered around the island, almost all not moving. There were three hundred and sixty survivors still on the island.
For the next ten days she would have to monitor the entire area carefully to make sure to include anyone who came and went.
All over the ship she knew that others were also having long nights, working to track every survivor in their areas.
Four other large starships were now in orbit with the Star Conscious, three of them Seeder ships. All five ships were working on the same task she was doing over various parts of the world. There were billions dead, but by best estimates, over two million survivors.
Their mission was to not miss a person for this rescue from the second deadly electromagnetic pulse. If they rescued everyone, it would give the population of this planet a huge jump forward in a restart.
She spent another fifteen minutes going over everything, making sure she hadn’t missed anyone for the night.
She hadn’t.
Now she had to get some rest somehow. She would come back to this in a few hours as the sun came up over the city below and start tracking closely all of the people below to see their situations.
She dumped out the last of her cold coffee, slipped into her exercise clothes, and jumped to the ship’s gym. It was a huge room with a hundred different machines, a very long running track, a climbing wall, and courts for various racket games. She liked the weight machines and did a quick fifteen-minute workout alone. She almost never had the big exercise area to herself. It felt good.
And eerily silent.
When she finished, she felt better, her muscles from so much time at the machine now loose. She jumped back to her apartment and took a quick shower to try to wash away some of the day, then got into her running shorts, a light exercise shirt, and her slippers.
That was her normal evening-at-home clothes and even though this was far from a normal evening, she wanted to pretend it was.
She went with a snack plate of crackers and cheese to the big comfortable couch in her living room.
There she clicked on a comedy movie done on the last planet she had been embedded in. She had seen it before and knew it was good. Right now she needed something to clear the images of that dead city and all those bodies from her mind.
If that was ever going to be possible.
She stretched out on her couch, a soft cloth pillow under her head, a thin blanket over her legs and feet. She started up the movie and took a few crackers, munching slowly, focusing on the movie she had already seen.
Somewhere in the first third of the movie she dozed off. Thankfully, the movie playing kept most of the nightmares back.
Not all of them, but most.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY ELEVEN IN the evening, Benny had borrowed the keys off a guard’s body and found the security room. It had twenty monitors that all seemed to be working.
Twenty different views of the area around the building and the lobbies. And a couple of the monitors cycled through eight images as he watched.
Nothing was moving on any of the monitors.
Nothing.
For a short time he just kept staring at them, looking from one to another, expecting something to move.
Finally he shook his head.
“Benny, you’ve got yourself into a real mess this time.”
His voice echoed in the bedroom-sized security room.
Staring at all the bodies showing on those cameras, he almost decided to just pack and head for Florida. Or maybe he could go north into the Canadian wilderness, join the bears shitting in the woods.
Then he shook that thought away.
This city was his home and he would be damned if he was going to let the fact that most everyone was dead scare him off.
It took him another half hour in the security room to clear out the three guard’s bodies filling the chairs and a fourth guard in a back break room. Then he spent an hour finding all the generators for all the floors and the ones that ran the elevators. The generators had more than enough fuel, and when that ran out, he could re-supply easily from all the cars and trucks on the street.
From a diagram in the guardroom, he could tell there was a good-sized water tank up high that had electrical pumps. He was going to have to check every room to make sure all the water was turned off so that didn’t drain out when the power shut off.
The Empire State Building was all offices and meeting rooms and tourist stuff. No apartments, so he would have to find a really high office and clean that out and set up an apartment. That would be easy to do.
He hoped.
He had a hunch none of what he was thinking of doing was going to be easy.
For the next hour, he went around taking all the keys and guns from the dead guards and then locking the five main entrances to the building. That felt weird, like he was locking out the dead, but if he wanted to be secure, no point in taking any chances that some other survivors had this idea.
The last thing he needed were survivors with more guns than he had. And in New York, nut cases with guns scared him more than almost anything else.
Outside the doors, the lights of the city looked very strange on all the people scattered dead on the sidewalks.
He went back to the main security area and spent the rest of the night making sure he knew all the details of the building, or at least as much as he could find.
He didn’t want to be on an elevator with no chance of rescue when the power went out. He needed to know that the back-up generators would kick in and if that didn’t happen, how to do an emergency escape from the elevator. He had a hunch he was going to be spending a lot of time in those elevators. Being trapped alive in one with no chance of rescue scared him cold.
Somewhere along the way, he fell asleep for a few hours on a cot in a side room off the security area.
He didn’t even remember lying down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GINA AWOKE SWEATING on the couch, the light blanket twisted around her feet. Her mouth was dry and her short hair was plastered to her head.
She pushed away any thought of trying to remember any dream and managed to get untangled and get to her feet. The screen was blank, so the movie had ended and the system had shut down.
She clicked it off and glanced at a clock near the screen. She had been asleep for three hours. The sun would be coming up on the city below. She needed to get back to work.
She headed for the bathroom for another shower, then to her kitchen to get a few bagels with cream cheese and a large glass of orange juice. That was her breakfast of choice most mornings and it got her going.
Usually she headed to the ship’s gym after breakfast to do her regular hour-long exercise routine, but today she would skip that.
Too much to do, too many lives at stake.
She got back into her office to her screens and discovered that while she had slept, five of her tagged survivors had left the island. She transferred them to the person monitoring the area they were in.
There were also six new red dots on her screen and she quickly tagged them. She had no idea where they had come from. More than likely deep underground, although her system could penetrate through a hundred feet of rock and any building.
But there was a good chance they had been farther underground than that last night.
She sat eating her breakfast while methodically checking her survivors to make sure they were tagged correctly.
She had just finished her breakfast and downed the last of her orange juice when one of her green lights winked out.
She instantly focused her tracking on it, afraid of what she might find, but knowing she had to look anyway.
The survivor had been a man about fifty. He had taken a gun to his head while sitting next to his wife and two teenage kids who had died while eating.
She felt sick, looking at the scene of death like a snooping angel.
She made a note with shaking hands that he was dead and then pulled back so she didn’t have to look at the scene any more.
She knew, and everyone who was doing her job had been briefed, that over the next ten days, while they were tracking the survivors for the rescue and waiting for all the ships to arrive, many survivors would either be killed or take their own lives.
She just hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
She pushed back from her desk and took her orange juice glass and plate she had used for the bagels to the kitchen.
Then she just stood there, her head down over the sink, shaking.
She had been alive for almost two hundred years, had seen many things in the cultures she had worked, but she had no doubt the next nine days until rescue were going to be some of the longest and hardest days she had ever lived.
And then after that, it would only get worse.
After that, she would be down there, on those streets, with the survivors, trying to help.
CHAPTER NINE
AN ALARM WOKE Benny up.
&nbs
p; He scrambled to the screens in the main security room, at first not remembering where he was or what had happened.
Then he saw all the bodies and nothing moving. The sun was slowly bringing light to the city.
The first full day of death was dawning.
An alarm was flashing and ringing like an insane doorbell that it was time to open the doors.
He shut it off, dropping the room back into welcome silence.
He went back to the cot where he had passed out a few hours before and clicked on a radio there. It gave him no more hope than it had yesterday.
Outside, it looked overcast and cool. That was good for the moment, since it would slow down the body decay slightly on the people in the streets.
And keep most of them from heating up in the sun, swelling, and exploding from the expanding gas inside of them. He had seen that a few times in Iraq as well.
He hoped to never see it again.
He banged open a candy machine in the break room and breakfast consisted of a couple packs of nuts and a Diet Coke.
From what he could tell from the monitors, there had to have been at least three or four hundred people in this building when humanities number came up. No way he was going to move all of them ahead of when they would start smelling.
He was just going to have to go up high, to the 102 Floor Observatory, and work his way down, clearing every body he could find from as many top floors as he could.
About a third of the way up, a person had to change elevators and there were a lot of bodies in that lobby area, so he just figured more there wouldn’t hurt.
But when he got to that lobby, he decided that was a bad idea. He was going to have to go through that transition floor all the time. He needed to clear that first.
He went down three floors from the transition area and into a huge office suite. There were a good twenty bodies in the big room that he could see.
Using a large fire ax, he broke out some of the windows in an office there, letting in the morning-chilled wind from outside. The office had a door on it that he could close after he was finished.
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